Susan Granger’s DVD Update for week of Friday, October 29:
Just in time for Halloween, there’s the High-Def version of the truly terrifying “Magic,” starring Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins and iconic sex kitten Ann-Margret in a bizarre story of a brash, foul-mouthed ventriloquist’s dummy with a mind of its own.
In the same scary vein, “Skeletons” introduces two eccentric traveling salesmen (British comedy duo Andrew Buckley and Ed Gaughan) who wander in and out of strangers’ lives exposing their innermost secrets behind their door of lies. “All My Friends are Funeral Singers: Collectors Edition” is the definitive version of the acclaimed indie written/directed by Tim Rutili of the rock group Califone. And Edward Furlong and Shannon Elizabeth head the killer cast of the bloody remake of “Night of the Demons.”
Tilda Swinton plays four roles in “Teknolust” about Rosetta Stone and her three self-replicating automatons. To survive, they need sustenance of male Y chromosome, found only in sperm, so they harvest it the old-fashioned way, which leads to a quest for love.
Like Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, you need to read/see “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” to understand the suspenseful sequel, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” with Michael Nyqvist as a crusading Stockholm business journalist and Noomi Rapace as the brilliant, pierced-and-tattooed, punk computer hacker who becomes his colleague.
Barry Levinson’s “You Don’t Know Jack: The Life and Deaths of Jack Kvorkian” features Al Pacino as the controversial physician who challenges the rules by which we live and die – with Susan Sarandon, Danny Huston, Brenda Vaccaro and John Goodman.
Part thriller/part dark comedy/part social satire, “Four Boxes” finds three friends stumbling onto a surveillance-cam website and a psychopath planning mass murder.
Shallow and superficial, “Sex and the City 2” turns the once-fabulous foursome (Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon) into rude, insensitive tourists traveling to Abu Dhabi, breaking Muslim laws and abusing Arabic hospitality.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Jennifer Lawrence delivers a breakthrough performance in “Winter’s Bone,” a serious, sensitive, stirring, rural film noir, revealing the gritty, cruelly uncompromising world in the Southwestern Missouri Ozarks.